Vadim Girlin has proposed a Mesa patch that would enable the "R600 SB" shader optimizations to be enabled by default for the Radeon Gallium3D driver. This R600 SB support has already become very popular with Linux graphics enthusiasts for its performance-enhancing abilities.

In recent months I have delivered a number of R600 SB shader optimization benchmarks for the AMD Gallium3D shader back-end that's part of Mesa 9.2. I've also delivered tests of the R600 LLVM back-end that's also been progressing in recent months and viewed as the future for AMD's open-source driver. This weekend are some independent tests of the R600 LLVM and SB back-ends.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver now has support for the latest graphics cards, there's finally UVD video decoding, and the Linux 3.11 kernel brings dynamic power management, there's still features being desired by those using this open-source Linux graphics driver on ATI/AMD GPUs.

Marek Olšák, the well known Radeon Gallium3D contributor and AMD's newest open-source employee, has implemented multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support for the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver plus made other changes.

Going back to June on Phoronix there have been Ubuntu Mir/XMir performance benchmarks. Up to this point these benchmarks have only been done with Intel and Nouveau graphics drivers, since the AMD Radeon driver has been rather problematic with XMir. Sadly, this still appears to be the case.

Version 7.2.0 of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver was released this morning. While the X.Org drivers aren't too exciting these days with most of the really great work happening within the DRM or Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there's still an interesting number of changes to xf86-video-ati 7.2.0 for Radeon GPU hardware support.

With the belief that the Radeon dynamic power management (DPM) support is in good shape, it's a great time to try out this feature of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver. DPM has the capability of increasing the performance for some Radeon GPUs while for other GPUs it will lead to lower power consumption, extended battery life, and lower operating temperatures.